Chapter 13: His Side of the Story
I always wanted to be a father. Speaking now from experience, it is truly rewarding, but not without its challenges. These challenges are supposed to start when your babies are brought into the world, though, not months and even years before.
I still remember the first night my wife and I decided to try to get pregnant. It was such a wonderful experience. But as one attempt turned into ten, which turned into what felt like one thousand, it quickly lost its luster. As a man, you hear the joke, “Well, if there is something to not be good at, this is it,” but when you’re trying to conceive a baby, lovemaking really gets old and becomes more of a job than the truly intimate experience it should be. And it puts significant pressure on the marriage.
It is not easy to learn, as a healthy, athletic young man, that your sperm do not swim. Even so, this was the easiest part for me to get past. What came next would try me as a person, as well as strain my marriage nearly to the breaking point. After receiving the results of the tests on my sperm, I accepted the fact that it was nearly impossible for me to impregnate my wife. Also, it seems I had mentally accepted that I would probably never have my own children. In retrospect, I see that I had accepted my fate without even realizing it.
When my wife began really pushing for us to consider in vitro fertilization (IVF), I had significant reservations. My biggest mental challenge was about spending a large amount of money only to hear, “Maybe you’ll become pregnant.” Even though I saw how distraught Kelly was once we learned we couldn’t get pregnant, I didn’t want to take the chance of going through the in vitro cycle to potentially come up with nothing. I was afraid she would end up a shell of a person, and I didn’t want to go there.
Kelly and I had several “discussions” around the issue of getting pregnant, the in vitro cycle, what our future held, and the fact that both of us had wanted children when we originally decided to get married. At a point in our marriage when we should have been truly close, we were miles apart. I simply didn’t like the prospects of going into anything with less than a 100 percent chance of success, especially something as monumental and risky as this. I was afraid of the future ramifications for us if it didn’t work — or even if it did work, and we ended up with a whole heck of a lot of kids. Neither of us was listening to the other at this point, as we were both convinced that “my” view was the right view. It wasn’t a lot of fun. Actually, it was a miserable process.
Everything about the process was stressful . . . deciding what we were going to do (in vitro, divorce, and who knows how many countless other options we each went through in our heads), getting educated about our choices, selecting a doctor once we did decide to go through with in vitro, and figuring out how to pay for it all. With all these decisions coming at us fast and furious, figuring out what color we were going to paint the baby’s room seemed so easy.
After several counseling sessions and learning how incredibly important it was to Kelly to become a mother, I realized how important it needed to be to me, too. I love my wife, and we both had wanted children before all this came about. I listened to my heart, and off to Las Vegas we went.
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